Getting Ahead of Yourself…and Your Reader

Have you ever read a novel that was a slog? I know. Kidding. You don’t have to answer that question. Of course you have.

What makes a novel a slog? Slow pace, mostly. But what is “pace”? It’s the speed with which narrative events unfold. Here’s the thing, though. There are exceptions. There are mile-a-minute plots that make us yawn, and riveting novels in which very little happens.

Fast plot pace isn’t a magic bullet. So what is? Voice? Inner Journey? Micro-tension? (A favorite topic of mine.) All the familiar craft elements we might discuss are important, but there’s an intangible one less often discussed that also deserves a look.

It’s leaping ahead. By that I mean zooming ahead of your readers, keeping them surprised by bringing them quickly to a place they haven’t yet anticipated. Readers are speedy. They’re shrewd. They like to guess what’s going to happen. Drop onto the page any plot or character bombshell and readers are already zipping ahead. They’re weighing the implications. They’re second guessing your characters, and you.

Put plainly, they’re writing your novel in their heads. What produces a sense of slog, then, is when readers get your story’s direction and developments right. When you eventually, slowly, catch up to where they’ve already arrived, it’s a letdown. A slog.

I’m not just talking about predictable plot. Relationships can unfold predictably too. Scenes can go exactly as we expect. The inner lives of characters can plod down an obvious path. Inner journeys can unfold obviously, too, their outcomes signaled from the beginning and no surprise when they arrive.

Most of all there is an inner rhythm to characters’ experiences. Characters dwell in a state, that state shifts, in turn producing a feeling of dynamic human evolution, change, movement. Raw human experience has pace, just like plot.

That kind of pace is harder to manage. Some authors aren’t even aware of it. What I’m talking about are inner shifts in self-perception, awakenings, new understandings, ah-ha’s, and anything that produces a feeling that, okay, things somehow just got different. Screenwriters call these beats. On camera they’re caught in reaction shots. Dialogue ceases. The actors’ faces say it all: something unnamed has just changed.

Change, in turn, has implications and that especially is where your readers may speed ahead of you. The solution is to bring about inner changes, and to address their implications, before your readers arrive on their own. Accelerate what cannot be seen. Spring surprises of self-perception, awareness, or insights and the actions that result from those.

Jazz drummers keep swing music lively by slightly anticipating the beat. You can do the same in POV writing. Let’s take it from a practical standpoint:

Pick any scene. In this scene, what insight, realization or discovery is the POV character going to have about self, someone else or the situation? In what way will this character’s understanding of anything have shifted by the scene’s end?

Move that insight, realization or discovery to the middle of the scene. Make it a surprise not just for readers, but for your POV character.

This shift in understanding means that this character will now have to say or do something differently. Do that immediately, before we even understand why.

Leaping ahead can be done in many ways. Dialogue can take sudden turns. Hidden truths can pop to the surface. Characters can smack their foreheads before we realize they need to be smacked. They can call each other out. They can unexpectedly withdraw. They can see things about others before we do. They can see things about themselves that aren’t obvious to anyone else.

When your POV characters leap ahead of your readers, you’re evolving those characters’ inner states at a smart pace. What you’re pacing brightly is a kind of shadow plot, the always-unfolding story not of events but of a human being.

How can you leap ahead of your readers in the scene you’re writing today? Surprise us!

Comments

Don – Over the holiday we binge-watched HBO’s The Pacific. In one of the final few episodes, the marine unit of one of the MCs, Eugene Sledge, has been slogging through the jungles of Peleliu for weeks, rooting out the remnants of a vicious and determined Japanese occupation. They’ve seen it all—the horrors of war as can only be imagined by those who survived them. The island is deemed “taken” by the brass, and the unit arrives back to their base-camp on the beach to a group of WAVES (the women’s naval reserve) in crisp whites, handing out lemonade to the returning men, dragging themselves by the lemonade table in exhaustion, wearing their tattered and filthy field uniforms.

Sledge walks up to a pretty blonde. She hands him a cup and says, “Welcome back.” He stares at her, and you can see it all. She looks like an alien to him, so pretty, so clean, so civilized. And he’s realizing *he’s* become the alien. He’s been pushed to the point of savagery. He knows he’s no longer civilized, that he’ll never really be clean again. That he’ll never be *normal* again, even with a beautiful gal back home. An officer shouts, “Okay, Marine, you’ve had your look-see. Move along.” The bastard thinks he’s ogling the girl. Sledge gives him a black look and throws the lemonade away. The officer hadn’t been through what he had. He doesn’t need to take orders anymore. But the war’s not over, so he will… for now.

It’s got to be the most wonderful encapsulation of innocence lost that I’ve seen. Two words: “Welcome back,” are spoken. It surprised me because we’re expecting the usual WW2 narrative—war is hell, good guys went and got the job done, and they came back and married their sweethearts, who waited for them under the apple tree, and then had the baby-boomers. It made me realize, better than I ever have, why my dad never spoke of the war—why he buried it away, how painful having it brought back must have been.

And now your post makes me realize how smart readers/viewers are, and how brilliant story can be if it’s deftly done, in surprising ways. The resonance came because I was surprised, and I wasn’t spoon-fed or hit over the head with it.

Thanks for bringing it all together for me here. That’s certainly worthy of a coffee. Heading back in to the manuscript to apply these valuable lessons.

Reading one of your posts is like listening to a wine connoisseur describe the 15 different flavors he gets from one sip of Pinot Noir, and all I can say is, “It’s good.”

I’m actually just beginning book 2 of my Navy Brat Books. So I’ll have to think about this one. But it would get chapter one off with a bang if I could surprise my protagonist (12 year-old girl in 1972 Hawaii) as well as my reader.

Maybe it’s like in all relationships, you are going along at a certain pace, a defined set of rules unexplained but felt and in place and then a curve ball is thrown that takes you out of that pace. This happens in relationships all the time. But in writing, your POV character has to get there before the reader. One question: can this method work early on in a novel when the manners and actions of two characters haven’t been definitively laid out for the reader? That’s something I am puzzled about. As always, you challenge me and so THANKS!

Don, to pick up on Vaughn’s binge-watching thing, I’ve been re-watching the West Wing. As I read (and re-read) your post, I found myself applying what you’re saying here to a particular story-line that, even the second time around, had me guessing about outcome. Someone leaks a story with huge national security implications. It’s a go-to-prison offense and red-herrings abound, so I start watching the facial expressions of the actors and thinking about their back-stories. It was like reverse-engineering the writing from impact back to inception. It all started when one character mentions something to another in an offhand way, then several episodes later, someone else mentions it in a new context and as a potential problem that quickly grows into a nightmare. There’s a spike in tension which then rolls back to simmering boil as an investigation weaves through the ongoing episodes. I couldn’t stop watching because I couldn’t get ahead of it. The writing has spoiled me for other offerings! Thanks for this.

One of the most brilliant films from the regards to tension that I have ever seen is Apocalyptico.

The high stakes game of personal survival, family survival, and inner and outer change are pitched to such a degree, that when the protagonist hits the beach, and is confronted by the Spanish ships, I literally felt the unexpected deep shock the way he did.

Everything the protagonist has been through has changed him forever, and it’s only the beginning.

Although on hindsight it makes perfect sense to me, the viewer, I never saw it coming.

This is a new one! I’m searching my brain for books that do this, but I honestly can’t come up with any and/or pinpoint examples. TV, however, does this all the time. My husband and I call it the “by God” moment, first noticed (by us) when we were watching House, back in the day. Dr. House would have his ah-ha/”by God” moment: that facial expression of pure understanding telling the viewer he’d made the jump before we ever could have. Then we watch to see what his realization was. I’m wondering now if books do it less often than TV, or if it’s simply less noticeable because we don’t see that look of realization which has become so common as to border on cliche. Very interesting take, Don. You’ve given me something to chew on.

I see the Eureka Moment in nearly every mystery novel, and sometimes in other genres. (If you visit that link, scroll down and click “Literature” for many examples.Harry Potter, Game of Thrones, and The Da Vinci Code are in there.)

I think it can work in either a screenplay or a novel, but in either case you have to plan ahead. The ploy will come across as artificial and cliche if you just drop in a shocking discovery with no build-up.

Instead, you should nudge the reader to realize something they didn’t know they already knew. You plant clues beforehand, hidden in plain sight. Then when the protagonist smacks himself on the forehead, readers smack themselves on the forehead. Why didn’t they notice that earlier? Now everything makes sense!

Don — I love this! Most of my “writing” time is time spent editing the fiction of others, but nonetheless this principle is one I’ll be making use of there as well. I like to think of editing and writing as the tricep and bicep of storytelling, and your posts, which I enjoy each month, continue to inspire me to push the boundaries further in all the work I do to improve as a storyteller (and in turn to help other storytellers improve as well).

Thanks, Don. Your post reminds me of President Obama’s speech on race in Philadelphia in 2008 – first address the specific issue or scene, then step back and address the bigger picture or entire story. I remember the powerful impact that speech had on me (and still has – I have seen it again several times), and a big part of the impact was in the connection between the specific and the larger issue. The end of your blog says it beautifully – “…the always-unfolding story not of events but of a human being.” Inspiring.

In my class at Master Craftfest yesterday, I talked about some writers who seem to get away with murder, violating the sacrcosanct laws we’re taught in creative writing classes. How do they get away with it?

The first kneejerk response is: genius. But the real answer I think lies closer to what you’re getting at here.

My example was Kate Atkinson, who violates the truism that inner life is dull and action is needed to move story forward. On the contrary, her characters are often in their own minds, but they’re cross-examining their lives, searching for answers, grappling with the dilemmas that afflict their lives.

Now, the key to why succeeds, I think, lies in the verbs: Cross-examining, searching, grappling. They’re not just navel-gazing or belaboring the obvious. Their revelations and discoveries create new levels of self-awareness and self-definition. The underlying machinery: constant growth, moving toward truth — or reckoning.

One way to make that growth compelling is, as you say, make a leap, show the character reaching an awareness ahead of the reader. Don’t be afraid to let the reader fill in the blanks — unless your leap is simply into thin air.

Yes! When an author’s being interviewed and says that his characters tell him what they’ll do next, this is what the author is talking about. Sometimes authors can genuinely surprise themselves, and other times they can do exactly what’s described here. Thanks for the peek behind the curtain.